In order to make energy consumers such as home owners aware of the energy usage of their various appliances, information regarding energy usage is often provided to the energy consumers. It is hoped that this awareness will help energy consumers to avoid energy waste in operating their appliances.
Measurement equipment could, of course, be installed for each of the consumer's energy consuming appliances, or least for each of the consumer's major energy consuming appliances. Outputs from such equipment could then be used to inform the consumers of the energy usage of their appliances. However, such equipment adds extra cost for each of the appliances being monitored.
Moreover, it is also desirable to install communication equipment in order to communicate the energy consumption of the various appliances to a central module where the energy awareness information related to the appliances can be calculated and presented to the consumer. However, if energy measuring equipment is used for each appliance, providing communication equipment for each energy measuring equipment results in even more cost.
Disclosed herein is an energy awareness system which avoids the addition of energy measurement equipment at each of the appliances to be monitored for energy awareness. Instead, the energy awareness system adds only one energy measurement equipment at the mains of the building or house. The awareness system, for example, may be arranged to poll the energy measurement equipment at the mains in order to fetch the energy consumption at the mains, and may further be arranged to use this energy consumption data and profiles of each of the appliance within the building or house to infer the consumption for each appliance.